‘Never thought anything about it. People are generally interested in the artists or photographers. Gave him your card with your number to call. He pushed for an address but as you know I don’t give out those kinds of details. Told him Pembrokeshire, that’s all. He didn’t buy anything though.’
And that was it. Beyond that last phone call his search for Erica came to a crashing dead end. Weeks passed and he got his life back on track after what he assumed was to be an extremely unsettling but short-lived period. It began to feel like it had all never happened. Then DI Styles turned up out of the blue at his door.
Gareth let him in. He asked to see where the symbol was.
‘I’m afraid I’ve painted over it some more and you can’t see it. Do you have any more information on all this? Why it appeared here?’
Styles touched the wall where the symbol was, and gave a vague answer that neither confirmed nor denied. ‘Have you heard anything more from the young woman?’ he asked.
‘Not a thing.’
‘Remember, you must contact me if you hear anything about her,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s evidence that the murdered woman wasn’t living alone. There might have been someone else living there in the flat with her.’
‘You think it’s the same woman I knocked over?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
‘What did you find out about the jewellery?’
Styles had unexpectedly wandered off, walking around the small room, his body appearing relaxed with his hands behind his back, but his eyes were like that of a raptor seeking prey. ‘Generally quite old, mostly Victorian, a few Georgian pieces, all good quality according to our experts, so someone with an eye for good stuff. We’ve estimated it as being around?90,000 in value. The provenance has yet to be determined, but it’s most likely stolen and the young woman probably had a hand in its disappearance. A fence, maybe.’
Gareth felt the sting of disappointment that Erica might prove to be nothing more than a common thief. ‘But there’s no proof of that, is there, that she stole it? I mean, she could have come about it quite legitimately.’
Styles looked at him like he was dealing with a child that could not, or would not, understand. ‘Innocent until proven guilty and all that,’ he said. ‘But my advice is to not take her at face value, or believe a word she told you; she’s probably conducting some kind of scam. At the very least she’s involved in something extremely suspicious, maybe even dangerous. So, as I said, your first port of call is me if you see anything of her or hear from her again,’ he reiterated, this time with more of an edge to it. ‘Do you remember a certain sapphire and diamond brooch amongst the jewellery?’
Gareth nodded. ‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if the stones were real or not.’
‘Oh yes, very real indeed. Turns out it’s by Cartier, hallmark for 1938, a commission piece. This brooch alone has a value of?60,000. Also turns out that this particular brooch was reported stolen over seventy years ago.’
‘You’re telling me it’s been lost seventy years and only just turned up?’
‘Reported missing in January 1940. It was one item from a significant number of others stolen at the time from a family mansion. At today’s value the hoard amounts to over one million pounds, maybe far more, given that amongst it there were two rare paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Back then they weren’t worth much, but today they fetch huge sums. The son of the man who owned the stolen property never gave up searching for it. He’s had photographs and information on it circulating ever since; there’s even a webpage devoted to the missing stuff. It’s paid off because the brooch has now found its rightful owner. Bit of a time lag, admitted, but he’s pleased as punch; at least one family heirloom returned and all that.’
‘How come she had it?’ he asked, feeling deflated.
‘All manner of things could have happened to the brooch and the other pieces since 1940, passed through all kinds of dirty hands, a section of it finally ending up in her little collection. She’s been nicknamed the Magpie down at the station.’ He gave a wry chuckle. ‘We’d very much like to have her in for questioning,’ he said, all humour instantly gone. ‘The brooch is still being held as possible evidence in a murder investigation, so we can’t release it yet. But, more to the point, the gentleman to whom the brooch now belongs has offered a not insubstantial reward for its return and any evidence of the other missing pieces. You, sir, are to be the recipient of that reward. Aren’t you a lucky man?’
‘I couldn’t take it,’ he said.
‘That’s up to you, sir. All the same, I’ve been told to give you this.’ He handed Gareth a piece of paper. ‘He’s desperate to meet the man who found his father’s property. Sentimental value, you see. Wouldn’t hurt to meet him; he’s an old guy and you know how they can be. You might also be interested to know who the man is.’
‘I might?’
‘He’s not exactly your ordinary man on the street, this one. He’s Sir David Lambert-Chide.’
‘The pharmaceutical guy?’ said Gareth.
‘The one and the same,’ said Styles. ‘His father founded the company. As a billionaire he’s not short of a bob or two, so if it were me I wouldn’t be too hasty in refusing his generosity. Could be worth your while,’ he said, glancing around his Spartan living room. ‘And it’s not as if you don’t deserve it, being recognised for doing your civic duty.’ His voice barely hid the sarcasm. ‘Like I say, sir, up to you what you decide to do. Naturally, we didn’t give your name out to him.’
The meeting concluded and Gareth walked the officer to the door. ‘You really think she’s a thief?’ he asked.
‘I think she’s not what she seems,’ he returned.
He reminded him yet again to contact him if he should ever see her again, but Gareth thought that highly unlikely now. But he could not scrub away the thought that she was a petty thief. He could not budge the notion that she just might be the sister he never knew he had. The two thoughts bumped up angrily against each other like stags in rut.
He eventually decided he wanted nothing to do with any reward for the brooch, until very late one evening the phone rang insistently. He tried his best to ignore it, but as it could be business and he was in desperate need of that he gave in.
‘Hello,’ he said. The line remained silent. He could hear, faintly, someone breathing — a light, rapid panting. ‘Hello,’ he said again. ‘Look, if this is some kind of prank…’ Still there was silence but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to hang up. He held the phone close to his mouth and spoke softly: ‘Erica, is that you?’
The line went dead.
He hadn’t thrown away the scrap of paper with the contact details on it. Why, as he’d decided not to claim the reward, he didn’t know. Instead he’d stuffed it into a drawer from where he now retrieved it. He couldn’t be certain, but he knew it had been Erica at the other end of the line. By rights he should have contacted the police immediately. Again, his screaming emotions drowned out whispering logic. He needed to find her. She might be in trouble with the police but he didn’t care. He was desperate. The brooch was the only link to Erica, and David Lambert-Chide was the only link to the brooch. Maybe there was the slightest chance he could join the two up. And he needed to know about the brooch’s disappearance, perhaps even find proof that Erica wasn’t the last in a long line of dirty hands, as Styles had intimated. It was a slim hope, but any hope was welcome.
Gareth sat down at his laptop and carried out a search on Sir David Lambert-Chide. There was a surprising amount of biographical information available, a lot of it authorised.
He was born in London in 1921 to Simon and Elizabeth Lambert-Chide. He’d not only been born with a silver spoon in his mouth; he’d had an entire canteen. The Lambert-Chides were extremely wealthy people even back then, growing rich on the back of a successful chemical and pharmaceutical business.
David was an only son, had the usual privileged education at Oxford, fought as a young pilot in the Second World War with distinction and inherited the family business and estates when his father died of a heart attack in 1949. At the age of 27 he set about adding to their already large business portfolio, expanding rapidly through acquisition, merger and a raft of innovative and lucrative advances in the pharmaceutical side of affairs. They become a leading player in the industry, abandoning the chemical arm by the mid-1970s. The company still operated from its original base on the Golden Mile in Brentford, in a purpose-built building in the Art Deco style, which his father had specially commissioned back in the late 1920’s. The photograph of the Lambert-Chide building showed an impressive edifice to industry and power — a grand Art Deco entrance flanked by huge oblong pillars, a tier of stone steps leading up to immense double doors, and to top it all off a clock tower looked down on everything like a huge one-eyed Cyclops.